The Final Girls – Good, Bad & Ugly Review

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 68% (Critics) / 77% (Audience)Directed By: Todd Strauss-SchulsonWritten By: NM.A. Fortin and Joshua John MillerStarring: Taissa Farmiga, Malin Akerman, Nina Dobrev, Alexander Ludwig and Adam DeVineStudio: Stage 6 FilmsSynopsis: A young woman grieving the loss of her mother, a famous scream queen from the 1980s, finds herself pulled into the world of her mom’s most famous movie. Reunited, the women must fight off the film’s maniacal killer. – (Source)

The Good:
There are not many comedy/horror movies that can lay claim to being a very effective mother/daughter love story as well. The relationship between Taissa Farmiga’s Max and Malin Akerman as her doomed actress mother was such a heartfelt one and provided some of the film’s best scenes.
Of course the rest of the awesome in THE FINAL GIRLS came from the way it played with slasher movie tropes and the humor they were able to mine out of it.
There were also some really cool directing moments from the way flashbacks were depicted to effects of slow-motion on the main characters.
And I loved this cast. All of them delivered in the comedy and in the horror parts.

The Bad:
Billy Murphy wasn’t that strong a character as this movie’s villain or as a knock off on Jason Voorhees from the FRIDAY THE 13TH franchise. It would have been really perfect if they could have used the character of Jason as this film’s bad guy.

The Ugly:
The ending was a bit of a cop-out and I really wish they didn’t wipe away what actually happened to these characters. It cheapened a lot of the things that came before.

Final Verdict: A funny homage to the slasher genre that delivers scares, laughs and a heaping helping of heart. A winning cast and snappy direction also makes THE FINAL GIRLS one of the most enjoyable horror films I have watched this year.